Asheville takes another chance on year-round schools

For every summer day that student is spending outside the classroom, the gap between a student with a wealth of at-home learning opportunities and those without widens a little bit.

Student Tanyjae Whitson helps artist Alex Irvine put the finishing touches on the mural adorning the exterior of Hall Fletcher Elementary before a dedication ceremony at the school last year.(Photo:
Citizen-Times File Photo
)

ASHEVILLE – While most kids envision long summer swims and endless ice cream, the weeks of summer have evoked a different image for city school administrators for years.

For every summer day that a student is spending outside the classroom, the gap between a student with a wealth of at-home learning opportunities and those without widens a little bit.

To help eliminate the summer slide, many Western North Carolina schools have experimented with moving to a year-round calendar, essentially eliminating the long summer break. The move can carry a boost for test scores, but many schools shift back to a traditional schedule because of scheduling complications or tradition.

Hall Fletcher Elementary will shift to one of the “balanced” calendars in July, marking the first attempt since the mid 1990s for an Asheville or Buncombe school to make the move.

Many have tried the approach, and about as many have failed in almost every district in WNC, but not necessarily for lack of success or popularity.

“We’ve got an issue here, and if we’re going to solve it, I think we have to shoot all arrows at it to mitigate that summer loss,” assistant superintendent of curriculum and instruction Kelvin Cyrus said. “This is our best shot.”

The city Board of Education unanimously approved Hall Fletcher as a pilot for the 2014-15 school year. The school’s 300 students will be in class for nine weeks and off for three throughout the year.

The school system held multiple community meetings and panel discussions in the fall, which, according to Cyrus, was about 2-to-1 in favor of the balanced calendar.

The school district picked Hall Fletcher because it has the highest percentage of students getting free and reduced-price lunches, and it had the highest percentage of faculty support in a staff survey on the calendar option. More than 90 percent of teachers surveyed supported the move, Cyrus said.

So why, then, if the model has received such relatively wide support, have more districts not taken up the model? And for those who have, why hasn’t it stuck?

“I think many programs that haven’t been successful struggled because they weren’t very purposeful around the intersession times, and that is key,” Cyrus said. “For us, it’s going to be about maximizing that bonus learning time, making every effort to make sure those off-times are working for us.”

A history of attempts

The idea has been popular in many districts in the past — it’s even been implemented in several area schools –— but few have been able to maintain the system with schools on mixed calendars.

Typically, a district will move one school to the calendar as a pilot program. Only one other district in the state has implemented the measure districtwide.

Hall Fletcher Elementary actually tried the model in the mid ’90s, but returned to the traditional calendar in 1997.

Year-round school was popular with parents, but at the time it was discontinued, school board members said the additional costs outweighed minimal academic gains.

Hendersonville Elementary has been with the model for more than 20 years, and Bruce Drysdale Elementary, also in Henderson County, took up the calendar four years ago.

Although close geographically, Bruce Drysdale Elementary has a much larger percentage of low-income and minority families, and the students have lagged behind the students at more affluent Hendersonville Elementary on end-of-grade tests.

Henderson County assistant superintendent for administrative services Bill Parker said Bruce Drysdale has seen positive growth in testing scores, though it’s hard to say which programs might have been most beneficial.

The shift at Drysdale was extremely popular among parents and staff, Parker said, and has long been a draw for families to Hendersonville Elementary. Many parents who live in the Bruce Drysdale area, who have in the past asked to be transferred to other schools, are actually staying with the nearby school because of the new model.

Eastfield Elementary in McDowell County has used the model for several years, with wide popularity and positive early data to support it. The school has seen some academic growth, Garrett said, even going against the greater trend in the county of declines in test scores.

“Folks are hesitant before they go to the calendar, but after they do it, they don’t want to leave,” superintendent Mark Garrett said.

“The initial step is scary, but it’s been incredibly popular in our county.”

Garrett said getting the idea off the ground is typically what stops most districts from trying it, but, “it’s really hard to find people who are against it once they make the move. It’s pretty remarkable.”

Black Mountain Primary school in Buncombe tried the model about the time Hall Fletcher did, but it was not renewed by the board after a few years.

Buncombe County Schools spokesman Jason Rhodes said the district has floated the idea in the past, but it hasn’t been considered with any real seriousness for years.

While economically advantaged students learn more through their summer learning opportunities, studies suggest, students from lower-income households lose knowledge gained during the school year, and the achievement gap widens on both ends, more and more with each summer.

The need to close that gap is startling in the City School district.

For third grade reading proficiency, 76.6 percent of white students scored proficient. That was true for just 22.6 percent of black students, a 54 percent gap.

The year before was even worse: 94.3 percent of white students scored as proficient, while 33.8 percent of black students did, a 60.5 percent difference.

LaVette McDaniel, who attended Hall Fletcher when the school tried a year-round calendar for several years in the 1990s, now has a second-grader at the school and says she’s thrilled her daughter will experience the schedule.

“I definitely gained more than I lost during those in-between weeks, and I remembered what was taught much more than when I went to schools with full summers,” McDaniel said. “I could feel the difference once I moved out of the year-round calendar and into middle school, and I forgot a lot over the summer.

“It also makes it a lot easier on teachers, who can do less reviewing and move on to teach kids more,” she said. “I think it’s a good idea and definitely worth a try. I’m really glad they picked Hall Fletcher.”

Defining success

It’s difficult to get pure data tracking student success in schools that move to the year-round option, Cyrus said, because the calendar change is often accompanied by other improvements and draws a different student demographic.

Drysdale Elementary and Eastfield implemented dual immersion language programs about the time they changed calendars, for instance, and both have made other programming changes that could contribute to better test scores and growth.

But both have seen positive effects, even in as few as two to three years.

Cyrus said the city school district will monitor test scores closely to see how they move but pointed out that a change like this will take time to show progress.

Another difficulty in tracking the success of schools that move to year-round calendars is that it inherently draws students whose families are more involved, since many schools on different calendars require parent transportation.

Parker said that may have proven to be the case at Hendersonville Elementary, though the demographic at Drysdale has stayed largely the same.

The parents who have expressed more concern than excitement are primarily worried about juggling child care and vacation schedules, especially with children in other city schools. Administrators say that is the number one complaint — and has traditionally been a pitfall — of moving only one school to the option.

The YMCA has already committed to match an after-school program with the school’s schedule, and will work closely with them during intersession times.

The early projections on expected costs for the change, which will primarily be for intersession and after-school programming, is about $80,000.

“At this point, we have been having the same conversation for so many years that something just has to change,” Hall Fletcher principal Gordon Grant said. “We’re just thrilled it’s happening here.”